Two weeks. Then you know what you actually own.
Most owners can’t answer four questions about their own technology: what you’re paying for, what breaks if it fails, who has the keys, and what’s exposed. You get all four answered in writing — for a flat fee, and you keep the document whether or not you ever hire us again.
The four questions
These are the questions a CIO is supposed to be able to answer on demand. If nobody in your business owns that seat, nobody is answering them. That seat is what a fractional CIO fills — a vCIO, if your last provider used that word — and this review is how it starts.
What are you paying for, and what do you use?
Every license, platform, and subscription on the invoice, matched against what’s actually running. Most businesses are paying for a capability they already own twice.
What happens when it breaks?
Backup coverage, restore reality, and what the business does on the day the server, the tenant, or the internet is gone. Not the policy — the actual test.
Who has the keys?
Every vendor, contractor, and former employee with standing access to your systems and data. Roughly half of breaches now arrive through somebody you let in.
What’s exposed right now?
What the internet can see about you: email authentication, published services, what an underwriter would find on a cyber insurance application before they price it.
What it costs
One number, agreed before anything starts. No hourly meter, no discovery phase you pay for separately.
If you move to a monthly engagement afterward, the full fee credits against your first month. The review is designed to be useful on its own. If it turns into ongoing work, you shouldn’t pay for the same look twice.
What it isn’t
- Not a sales call with a report attached.
- Not a penetration test. Different job, different specialist.
- Not a rip-and-replace recommendation. Most of what comes back is configuration and decisions, not purchases.
- Not a retainer you have to sign to get the findings. The document is yours at the readout either way.
The review fee is fixed before we start, and it doesn’t move based on what we find. We also keep a short standard stack — managed detection and response, zero-trust network access, password management — that we run in our own business before putting it in front of anyone else. We’d rather recommend three things we use every day than hand you a market survey.
Cybertitans resells some of those products. If one lands in your findings, we’ll say so in the document and tell you what we make on it. You can buy it through us, through your MSP, or direct from the vendor — the plan reads the same either way, and the fee doesn’t change.
Where we don’t have a stake, we’ll tell you that too. We’d rather show you where our incentive sits than ask you to assume we don’t have one.
And after that, if you want someone in the chair
Most owners take the plan and run it themselves. Some would rather not make the next decision alone either. That is what a fractional CIO is actually for, and you can have one without hiring one.
If we run your IT, you don’t buy this. The CIO work and the compliance program are both already inside TiTAN Elite. This is for companies whose IT is handled — in house, or by another provider — who still need someone senior deciding where it goes next.
What the retainer covers
A monthly working session, your roadmap kept current, and your vendors handled — contracts read, renewals negotiated, and the software nobody uses cut.
Service levels checked rather than assumed. Most SLAs measure the wrong thing and nobody has ever gone back to verify them.
Continuity planned for the day it breaks — backup, recovery, and what the business does while systems are down. Tested, not assumed.
And the decisions you bring before you make them: new software, a hire, a migration, the expansion nobody has costed yet.
How it runs
Two weeks, and about three hours of your time total.
- Kickoff — 60 minutesYou tell us what’s bugging you, in your words. We write the problem statement and hand it back before anything else happens.
- Read-only accessWhatever you can give us: invoices, admin portals, the MSP’s reports. We work from what exists. Nothing gets changed.
- Days two through nineThe four questions, answered against your actual environment. We come back with clarifiers, not a status meeting.
- Readout — 60 minutesWe walk you through the findings and the ranked 90-day plan, with what each item costs and what happens if you skip it.
- You keep itThe written findings and the plan are yours. Hand them to your MSP, your board, your insurer, or the next person in this seat.
Who this is for
- A few people to a few hundred, and no full-time IT leader.
- You have an MSP or an IT person, and they’re competent — but nobody is steering. They answer tickets; nobody is deciding.
- There’s a decision on the desk: a vendor proposal, a renewal, a migration, an insurance application, an acquisition.
- Something already went wrong once and you don’t want to find out the same way twice.
Twenty minutes, and you’ll know if it’s worth doing.
Tell us what’s on your desk. If the review is the wrong tool for it, we’ll say so on the call — that answer is free and it takes twenty minutes.
Free templates
The Review tells you what is missing. These are what should exist.
Four of the questions the CIO Review answers come back to documents nobody wrote. We wrote them, and they are free to adapt — so you can close the easy gaps before we ever speak.
See the policy templates →